Prioritization vs zero rating: Discrimination on the internet

Axel Gautier () and Robert Somogyi

No 2018023, LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE from Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE)

Abstract: This paper analyzes two business practices on the mobile internet market, paid prioritization and zero-rating. Both violate the principle of net neutrality by allowing the internet service provider to discriminate different content types. In recent years these practices have attracted considerable media attention and regulatory interest. The EU, and until recently the US have banned paid prioritization but tolerated zero-rating under conditions. With prioritization, the ISP delivers content at different speeds and it is equivalent to a discrimination in terms of quality. With zero-rating, the ISP charges different prices for content and it is equivalent to a discrimination in terms of prices. We first show that neither of these practices lead to the exclusion of a content provider, a serious concern of net neutrality advocates. The ISP chooses prioritization when traffic is highly valuable for content providers and congestion is severe, and zero-rating in all other cases. Furthermore, investment in network capacity is suboptimal in the case of prioritization and socially optimal under zero-rating.

Keywords: net neutrality; paid prioritization; zero-rating; sponsored data; data cap; congestion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D21 L12 L51 L96 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-09-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-ict, nep-pay and nep-reg
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://sites.uclouvain.be/core/publications/coredp/coredp2018.html (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Prioritization vs zero-rating: Discrimination on the internet (2020)
Working Paper: Prioritization vs zero-rating: Discrimination on the internet (2020)
Working Paper: Prioritization vs Zero-Rating: Discrimination on the Internet (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cor:louvco:2018023

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE from Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE) Voie du Roman Pays 34, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium). Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Alain GILLIS ().